verbena-19

Fear Destroys what bin Laden could not

Thanks to Tom Feeley of Information Clearing House for these thought-provoking article excerpts which are a sampling from today's email newsletter. For more, please visit his informative site.

" One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn't win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help.

By Robert Steinback

If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution -- and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it -- I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.
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Telling it like it isn't

By Robert Fisk

I FIRST REALIZED the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his paper's more vociferous readers.
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Israel and the Neocons, The Libby Affair and the Internal War

By James Petras

Who were the fabricators of war propaganda, who was Libby protecting? And not only the "fabricators of war", but the strategic planners, speech-makers and architects of war who acted hand in hand with the propagandists and the journalists who disseminated the propaganda? What is the link between all these high- level functionaries, propagandists and journalists?
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UK: Cross-party support for war probe

By BBC

More than 100 MPs from across the Commons have backed a call for an inquiry by senior MPs into the handling of the Iraq war and its aftermath. The MPs include 49 Lib Dems, 26 Conservatives and 20 from Labour.
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"War is like a big machine that no one really knows how to run and when it gets out of control it ends up destroying the things you thought you were fighting for, and a lot of other things you kinda forgot you had." : Anonymous

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....most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self Reliance - 1841 - From 'Essays", First series

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"For in every city these two opposite parties [people vs aristocracy] are to be found, arising from the desire of the populace to avoid oppression of the great, and the desire of the great to command and oppress the people....For when the nobility see that they are unable to resist the people, they unite in exalting one of their number and creating him prince, so as to be able to carry out their own designs under the shadow of his authority." (Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. IX)

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"Protest that endures...is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence." Wendell Berry

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For the saddest words of tongue or pen these are : " It might have been". John Greenleaf Whittier

posted by Annamarie at 9:21 PM